Why Our 3D Printer Is Like a Vomiting Frat Boy

We’ve always been bullish on shamelessly promoting ourselves and so when we built our own 3D printer,  the self-proclaimed “most bad ass 3D printer ever” (see article here), we didn’t hold back.  That’s why we called it the “BFP” (Big F***king Printer), but that’s not why our 3D printer is a vomiting frat boy. 

Let us explain. You see, because we wanted to build a drone that has incredibly long flight time but is orders of magnitude less expensive, one of our key goals in designing the Modovolo Lift was to avoid exotic materials like kevlar. Kevlar is a great material for aerospace because it’s light and strong. But it’s super expensive and hard to produce at scale. 

That’s why we have our own proprietary plastic blend. It’s light and strong - and very inexpensive. The problem though is that it’s nearly impossible to print. For most plastics the 3D printer’s nozzle can turn on and off as it is printing the part so you can do things like print one side of the part, lift up the nozzle, and move it to the other side or you can have different nozzle speeds at different areas of the part. 

Not so with our proprietary plastic blend.  It’s like vomiting frat boy. Once it starts it doesn’t stop flowing until you are done printing.  So any 3D printer needs to be fast - and you need to do math. A lot of it. Why math? It’s so the print nozzle is moving the same speed across the part in the corners as in the straights so that the same amount of material is printing everywhere. And that is super hard to do. 

There are many benefits to this. For starters we have a 3D printer that is like a vomiting frat boy.  But to be serious (for a moment) this has forced us to build a proprietary 3D printer that is super fast and super inexpensive (that can do a lot of math).